Manufacturing has come a long way since its inception. Before that, it was always categorized as a sooty, gloomy and dangerous place; but today, it is all about innovation and implementing the latest technology. The manufacturing sectors have become so important to a point that they play a crucial role in contributing to a country’s GDP. For example, as stated by Sims in China Widens as World’s Largest Manufacturer, “In 2010, China overtook America as the world's largest manufacturing nation and in early 2013, they managed to generate $2.9 trillion in output annually against America's $2.43 trillion”.

In this modern era, the talk now is all about Industry 4.0, a name given to signal the trend of automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies. That said, the aspect of automation shouldn’t be applied solely for the production side as huge manufacturing companies often house a huge number of employees and this, in turn, comes with several issues pertaining to workforce management. This definitely will affect the industry as productivity is crucial in order for manufacturing companies to succeed and with cases such as tardiness and unrecorded leaves getting in the way of employees’ productivity, this will cause the industry to suffer losses. In regards to this, two significant manufacturing companies in Malaysia: Yee Lee Trading Co. Sdn. Bhd. and Tamura Electronics (M) Sdn. Bhd. have decided to upgrade their workforce management to the Cloud.

To start of, Yee Lee Corporation Bhd group (YLC) began its core business as an edible oil repacker in Malaysia in 1968. Since then it has grown into a fully integrated manufacturer and distributor. YLC group of companies are involved in various sectors such as manufacturing, marketing and distribution of fast moving consumer products, plantation and eco-tourism. Today, YLC has an established marketing and distribution network servicing both local/international customers as well as listed on the Main Market of Bursa Malaysia Securities Berhad. With a total employee strength of 2000, Yee Lee needed a solution that is fully scalable and this brings us to TimeTec TA, our Smart Time Attendance Solution.

In order to reduce cases where employees contribute to low productivity and absenteeism due to working schedules, it is best to monitor their attendances and when they clock in and out of their scheduled periods. Furthermore, as for shifts and overtimes along with having many employees to juggle as they put in their work, it will be a struggle for human resource to keep track of their attendance and activities. Hence, having an effective software and centralized online solution such as TimeTec TA is imperative to tackle these issues. Through TimeTec TA, there are three options available to collect time data from employees, such as through Biometrics Devices, Mobile App or PC Clocking. It is this level of flexibility that allows TimeTec Solutions to be applicable in Yee Lee’s operation. As such, Yee Lee is subscribed to TimeTec TA plus a bunch of TA100C for maximum performance.

That’s not all as Tamura Malaysia has likewise join the implementation by including TimeTec Leave as well. Tamura Corporation, the headquarters of the Group in Japan, has come a long way since its inception in 1924. The core business then was simply selling radios. As of now, Tamura Malaysia has achieved remarkable growth and is now a leading manufacturer and exporter in the ASEAN region for ferrite and power transformers, switching transformer, pulse transformer, factory automation machinery, choke coil, reactor and industrial transformer and more..

Similar in concept but with different execution, TimeTec Leave is a cloud-based system that handles the leave management aspect online. Why this is important for manufacturing companies such as Tamura is because, unscheduled leaves can, more often than not, be a bane to a company's business. Employees would call in sick or take time off from work and leave little to zero notice for their employers regarding their absence. This will result in low productivity/morale in the workplace and this situation is definitely a no-no for manufacturing sectors. That said, Tamura Malaysia is subscribed to both TimeTec TA and TimeTec Leave to help keep its workforce management in check without breaching the country’s labour law.

With more companies turning to cloud computing in work related matter to secure their data and access them whenever and wherever they like, the step towards Industry 4.0 is most certainly in the horizon as TimeTec Solutions is designed to reduce administrative overheads by eliminating manual calculations. This is done through TimeTec servers that manage, maintain and monitor storage of all data from the company's terminals, thus making everything automated as well as systematic for the Human Resource Department.